Rolf de Heer

In late April, the British Museum opened its major summer exhibition Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation (23 April – 2 August 2015), the first major UK survey of the history of indigenous Australia through objects. Drawing together art and artefacts from the museum’s own collection as well as those in Australia, alongside specially commissioned works, the exhibition is dedicated to celebrating the cultural strength and resistance of the world’s oldest continuing culture.

A swathe of festival and one-off screenings in the coming weeks will ensure that indigenous filmmaking is also firmly in the spotlight this summer, offering everything from popular features to documentaries, short films and anthropological studies.

Five fiction features, four documentaries, four shorts and one omnibus film, exploring life and death – from the outback to the city – with detours into sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll – Australian cinema is set to make a significant contribution to the 58th BFI London Film Festival, which takes place in cinemas across London, 8-19 October 2014.

Timed to coincide with the start of the Royal Academy’s major exhibition Australia (21 September – 8 December), the British Film Institute on London’s Southbank is staging Australia: Shifting Sands, a film season exploring ‘the most significant shift in Australian cinema in the last two decades: the emergence of Indigenous filmmaking’.

Following on from the success of last year’s Scala Forever season, which saw London film clubs and screening nights band together to toast the spirit of the legendary Scala Cinema (and the subsequent Ken Russell Forever tribute), the next six weeks see the project expand into Scala Beyond, with screenings held across the country to celebrate all forms of cinema exhibition in the UK.

Of course, no proper celebration of weird and wonderful cinema from around the globe would be complete without a few Antipodean delights, and Scala Beyond is absolutely no exception. Here’s a brief rundown of the Oz treats in store…

DEADLY DOUBLE-BILLS

Bad Boy Bubby (1993)

Central to the Oz film experience during Scala Beyond are a tasty pair of double-bills at London’s Roxy Bar and Screen in the final week of August.

On Wednesday 29th – eager to prove that ‘Oz cinema is so much more than hi-octane stuntmen and girls in white petticoats’ – Videotape Swap Shop present a truly twisted helping of noisy Oz-weird with Rolf de Heer’s utterly fantastic tale of a shut-in gone wild, Bad Boy Bubby (1993) [trailer], slotting seamlessly alongside Terry Bourke’s shockfest Night of Fear (1972) [trailer], which provides an extremely original take on the ‘rural car crash victim meets unhinged local’ scenario. The two films are linked by their unique approaches to sound design, and both deserve a big screen viewing. No strangers to Australian genre cinema, the VTSS team have anticipated their ‘Noisy Oz’ double with a series of ‘Oz Month’ blog posts throughout August. Bargain basement £4 earlybird tickets were still available at time of writing, otherwise entry is a measly £6 on the night.

The following evening, Thursday August 30, VTSS’s fellow cult film aficionados Filmbar70 present an ‘Eerie Down-Under Double’ at the Roxy that pits Ted Kotcheff’s ‘rediscovered’ classic Wake in Fright (1971) against Tony Williams’ off-kilter Next of Kin (1982). Retitled Outback for its North American release, the unmissable, brutally brilliant Wake in Fright follows an English schoolteacher as he departs his outback home headed for the beaches of Sydney. But a brief stopover in the rough and tumble mining town of Bundunyabba sees his summer holidays descend into a Dantean nightmare of greed, violence and good old fashioned ‘mateship’ [trailer]. In sharp contrast, Next of Kin is a gothic slow-boiler that dips into a stylish bag of tricks to crank up the tension as a young woman returns home after the death of her mother, whose diary sparks a series of spooky occurrences [trailer]. Tickets are £5 and are available in advance from the Roxy website or on the door.

FURTHER AFIELD

But the Oz action is not limited to London: Sunday August 26 sees the traveling delights of Picnic Cinema pitch up at Acorn Bank Gardens in Cumbria for an open-air presentation of Baz Luhrmann’s shamelessly gaudy Australian-shot, Parisian mash-up musical Moulin Rouge!. Tickets are £11/£6 (+bf) from SeeTickets and the gates open at 6pm with live music – BYO picnics and fin de siècle fancy dress highly encouraged!

Mad Max II (1981)

The north-west of England is also home to one of the highlights of the wider Scala Beyond program; a series of screenings staged by the excellent Abandon Normal Devices festival in a full-scale drive-in made from wrecked cars. Originally built in San Jose, California, Empire Drive-In is the work of Brooklyn artists Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark, and features sonic artworks by day whilst playing nocturnal host to a selection of shorts, docs and features relating to cars, urbanity and post-industrial landscapes. And in a landscape of smashed cars, it’s only fitting that their screening on Friday August 31 plays host to George Miller’s post-apocalyptic sequel spectacular Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981), in which Mel Gibson’s Max helps a small enclave of civilized survivors fight off the hording bandits led by a proto-Bane named Humungous [trailer]. Empire Drive-In can be found in the QPark on Hulme Street, Manchester, tickets are £7 and the screening will be preceded by short films and feature guest ‘interventions’ by Manchester drag/art/party collective Tranarchy.

ALL-NIGHTERS

Given that this is a festival celebrating the spirit of the old Scala Cinema – infamous for its ’round the clock screening schedules – it wouldn’t be complete without a few all-nighters. Australian films feature in two London quadruple-bills, with Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981) getting a second Scala Beyond showing at FilmBar70‘s World Wide Action All-Nighter at the Roxy Bar & Screen on Saturday September 1. The night kicks off with the Arnie mercenary classic Commando (1985) and also features Indonesian Cameron rip-off Lady Terminator (1989), cross-cultural Hong Kong fightfest Mafia vs Ninja (1985) and FilmBar70’s specially selected Top 10 Action Scenes of All Time. Tickets are £15 from the Roxy website or on the door and include free coffee and breakfast. [EDIT 31/08: This all-nighter has been postponed due to licensing issues.]

Also at the Roxy, Midnight Movies bring Scala Beyond to a fitting conclusion on Saturday September 29 with a celebration of proms, parties and the darker side of teen angst. The Fright at the Proms All-Nighter will feature Shaun Byrne’s Aussie psychotic jilted-lover gorefest, The Loved Ones (2009) [trailer] alongside Canadian cult classics Prom Night! (1980) and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II! (1987), as well as Brian de Palma’s classic blood-soaked Stephen King adaptation Carrie (1976). Tickets are £15 (+bf) from Eventbrite and the night kicks off at 10pm in true prom style, with photos, ‘guest chaperones’ and live DJs, with free breakfast baps for every ‘survivor’.

Scala Beyond runs from August 18 to September 29, 2012. Full programme details are available on the website.